As If On Cue…

By Derek Hunter

Sunday, January 11, 2015

The blood wasn’t yet dry in the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo before progressives started with the moral equivalences between Islamofascists and people in the United State who dare defy their orthodoxy of the left.

This is how the modern left works – no act, no matter how barbaric, is as bad as opposing their political desire. In many ways, in most ways actually, the American progressive left is radical Islam, only with a slightly smaller body count.

Freedom of speech, the “spark” that lit off the attack on the French satirical newspaper, is under assault from the progressive left even more so than it is Islamofascists. While extremist Muslims seek to forbid any criticism of Islam, the American left seeks to forbid any language, discussion or dissention that criticizes anything deemed progressive.

Conservative on a college campus? Good luck. Daniel Mael committed this unforgivable sin at Brandeis University and is paying for it. Progressives aren’t trying to take his lift, only ruin it.

Mael wrote a piece for Truth Revolt documenting what a fellow Brandeis student publicly tweeted after two New York City police officers were assassinated by a progressive anti-cop protester. Khadijah Lynch wrote, “i have no sympathy for the nypd who were murdered today.” She followed that the next day with, “Imao, all i just don’t really have sympathy for the cops who were shot. i hate this racist fucking country.” Charming, right?

Lynch undoubtedly will have a job waiting for her at NBC News, but Mael caught holy hell for reporting exactly what Lynch said.

Daniel was accused of putting Lynch’s safety at risk by publicizing her own words. Not her private words. Her tweeted words. Progressive student Michael Piccione set out to get Mael punished by the university because he “must be aware of the impact that publishing such articles could have on other people’s safety, and it is important that he be held accountable for his actions.”

In the progressive world expressing solidarity with someone who murders police officers is acceptable “free speech,” but shining light on those freely and proudly made comments is a hate crime. They may not have stormed Mael’s room to exact their “justice,” but they have put him under sustained attack in the hope of silencing him. They are the Kouachi brothers in spirit, if not deed.

But these bastions of fascism at $1,500 per credit hour are not the places where bad ideas go to die; these pioneers of “free speech zones” are the launching pads for progressives to join their fellow travelers in adulthood.

There is no debate with progressives; there is only acceptable thought and “the other.” Reality, no matter how blaring, need not apply.

The other day I tuned into MSNBC for a bit. It was kind of like visiting the zoo – you see a hippo in its natural habitat, but it’s not real. Chris Matthews was talking about how Republicans were now a rural, southern party on its way to irrelevance. I had to check to see if somehow they were running a show from 2008. They weren’t; it was new.

Now, I understand just how much progressives hate anyone who stands in the way of their agenda, but fresh examples of just how deep that hate runs and how self-delusional they’re willing to be about it still catch me off guard sometimes.

Republicans control the governorships and legislatures in 24 states, have 31 governors and 68 of a possible 98 legislative chambers across the country. Hate it all they want – and progressives hate the hell out of it – their hatred of that fact has no impact on it being a fact. The south, last I checked, wasn’t that big. But the progressive world, just as the jihadi world, has no time for reality. They’re not wearing blinders; they’ve gouged out their eyes in the hope of never seeing.

But in spite of their best efforts, light does creep in…and they snap. In radical Islam it results in terrorism; in radical progressivism it results in incoherent monologues, rambling “think pieces,” and condemnation as something “ist” or “phobic” that must be destroyed, along with anyone who ever has entertained such views.

There hasn’t been a single argument that progressives have won on merit. They simply declare their position the only valid one and label dissenters “deniers” or worse. They take their metaphorical ball and go home, declaring victory before any game was played.

And there’s never an original thought. Radical Islam operates on a mentality from 1,000 years ago. Progressives won’t expose themselves to an original thought because to do so would mean they can’t ignore the fact that their old ideas have failed everywhere they’ve been tried.

Mention the body count in the last 100 years of progressivism from Russia to China to German to Cuba and beyond, and they either pretend they weren’t truly progressive (“Stalin wasn’t a real communist; they should have followed Trotsky!”) or they try to claim these monsters were “right-wingers.”

That’s an increasingly common defense for progressives – that history’s greatest progressive monsters, with more than 100 million dead bodies piled under their feet, were, in fact, of the political right. One side advocates for bigger, all powerful and providing government; the other for smaller government, individual liberty and responsibility.

One side rails against banks, corporations, the successful, seeks to destroy anyone who disagrees and is incapable of tolerating dissent; the other believes merit, initiative and the free market provide everyone with an opportunity to make what they will and can of their lives.

One side believes in the largess of the state, the other the power of the individual. Yet somehow, thanks to ignorance and lies, despots who embraced varying degrees of socialism are of the right?

It’s possible an “extreme right-wing” government could lead to anarchy, but never totalitarianism. Which, be it called communism, socialism or fascism, is the exclusive domain of the left.

Yet that fact isn’t even glossed over; it’s lied about.

Along that same line, many progressives claim terrorists were “provoked” somehow. They’ll say it’s unacceptable to murder someone over a cartoon, but qualify it with a “what did you expect when you poke a bear?”

Then there’s the moral equivalence progressives always try to make between their tactical brethren and conservatives.

The day of the Paris terror attack, MSNBC had a guest say, “This isn’t just Islamic extremism. If you go back to the ‘80s during the Reagan administration, when Jerry Falwell sued Hustler magazine for portraying him having, I believe it was drunken incest with his mother in an outhouse, again in a visual form, and won a $150,000 court case against Hustler for that that was overturned by the Supreme Court I think 8 to 0. So, you know, religious fundamentalists of all stripes and all nationalities have this penchant to say ‘we want to be able to tell you what you can portray.’”

The host did not push back against the concept of one American suing another and people gunning down those who offended them as being one in the same because it didn’t seem out of bounds. When attacking a non-progressive there is no out of bounds, even if it means cheapening murder.

That’s because to progressives, as it is to Islamofascists, human life, like the truth, is expendable when it comes to advancing “the cause.” It is “Agenda Über Alles,” and I don’t use German accidentally.

Since the concept of free speech was the focus of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, that focus had to be changed. After all, if you defend the freedom of speech, there’s a possibility someone who isn’t progressive would exercise that right. So the discussion surrounding the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo has shifted to one of appropriateness.

Progressive media outlets and talking heads acknowledged that people have the right to offend anyone, including Muslims, but should they? Shouldn’t we err not on the side of caution (because that would be cowardly), but on the side of understanding? Isn’t it wrong to offend people’s religion simply because you can? Obviously, I mean only Muslims, Christians and Jews be damned.

The right to offend is a wonderful and important part of free speech, but the act of offending is wrong and unnecessarily provocative.

Progressives are, at every level, attempting to limit the ability of Americans to say what they like, no matter how “offensive” some hypersensitive pajama-wearing, latte-sipping, ready-to-cry “senior fellow” might find the act.

Progressives may not share the tactics of those monsters in Paris, but there is no doubt they share the same goal.